No existe la libertad, sino la búsqueda de la libertad, y esa búsqueda es la que nos hace libres.
Freedom does not exist, only the search for freedom, and this search is what sets us free.
Carlos Fuentes
Freedom, like peace, does not exist as a utopian condition, out there to be ‘discovered’. As Carlos Fuentes explains so beautifully, it exists only through a process, through a continuous (and never ending) process of searching for ‘that, which is yet to come’ (Latour, 2002). Geographers of peace have drawn similar conclusions. In her synthesis of geographical scholarships on peace, Loyd (2012) suggests that these works coalesce around a theoretical perspective where peace is conceptualized as a process rather than as constitutive of war (rejecting a dualist understanding of peace as the absence of war). Peace is a process that is always in the making, a process that infuses (and animates) the micro politics of everyday life. It is not the cosmopolitan imaginary of a conflict-free existence, that tends towards the homogenization of difference that Harvey (2000) warns against; the epistemic closure that political ecologists warn against. Peace is a process characterized by differences and conflicting knowledges, contestations that produce spaces of hybridity where the fluidity of identity and culture reside (Richmond, 2011). These are the spaces of agonism that Laclau & Mouffe (2001) and Mouffe (2005) explain are sites where capacities to resist are maintained, not restricted.
In an open letter to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto the Centro de Derechos Humanos Tepeyac (“Tepeyac”), a local catholic NGO that had worked in the Isthmus for almost twenty years, denounced the allegations of violent repression against the community of Álvaro Obregón (Lona Reyes, 2014). The letter urged the Federal government to take action to guarantee the safety of community leaders and, respect their collective exercise of self-determination to build understanding and peace
within their community25. The public denouncement of violence and the letter’s assertion that Alvaro Obregon was engaged in peace building was reiterated by Tepeyac own claim that they too were “fighting for peace, fruits of justice and love between peoples”26. As far as I know this was the first time an
organization in solidarity with these indigenous communities had explicitly used the language of peace to describe these localized struggles, even though violence had been used in the past. What is so significant about the language of peace as it is used here is that it recognizes the conflictual tactics of Zapotec and Ikjoots peoples to interrupt ‘green capital’ not as the cause of violence but as efforts to create, assert and protect their plural worlds in settings of real or apprehended violence (A. Mitchell, 2011). Their tactics to interrupt ‘green capital’ can be understood as forms of peacebuilding that are “less obvious to the liberal gaze” (Richmond, 2011, p. 142) and challenge the virtual peace of Mexico’s clean energy transition.
This thesis concludes with an analysis of what these place-based struggles to resist the expansion of capitalist wind farming teach us about transformative social and political practice in the context of conflicts over socionatural change for a ‘clean energy transition’. The purpose of this chapter is to engage in dialogue with policy makers, international development foundations and NGOs whose objectives are broadly oriented around social justice and the transformation of socionatural conflicts. Many of the NGOs I am thinking will benefit from this dialogue work with indigenous communities in resistance. This thesis will be given to participants with an open invitation to question and challenge the analysis and conclusions. One of the initial objectives of this research was to understand the political effects of NGO interventions into the social conflicts over capitalist wind farming in the Isthmus. Were NGOs inadvertently flattening the politics at this ‘green energy’ frontier and therefore smoothing the way for the expansion of ‘green capital’? This was an ambitious objective. The answer remains uncertain. Exploring it will require a more intensive and long-term research program. However, by taking a historical perspective that examines how wind came to bear capitalist value, and by problematizing the framing of localized struggles as the cause of conflict, highlighting their continuation of long histories of struggle for land, territory and autonomy, I interpreted them as resistance-as- peacebuilding because they (a) make visible the structures of violence the commodification of wind exacerbates and (b) are generative of new
25 “el buen entendimiento y la paz entre los habitantes de esta comunidad” (Lona Reyes, 2014, p. 1) 26 “Estamos luchando por la paz, fruto de la justicia y el amor entre los pueblos” (Lona Reyes, 2014, p. 1)
sociopolitical relations between conflicting actors. Focusing on movement activities, and the agency that people are exercising, demonstrates the ways in which alternative visions of peace are being enacted (what Koopman (2011) describes as ‘alter-geopolitics’), where they are being enacted, and by whom. This reading provides some important insights.
I am cautious not to reify or romanticize the ‘local’ in this case. As all interviewees explained communities across the Isthmus appear divided in terms of their collective or individual opposition or support for the expansion of wind farming. Some communities have agreed to accept the benefits that flow from the wind farming projects (the case of Santa Maria del Mar is illustrative). However, in light of the historical continuities of marginalization and exclusion facing indigenous peoples in Mexico, it is difficult to reasonably conclude that these agreements were decisions ‘freely’ given. As Terry Eagleton remarks in his book ‘Why Marx was Right’, “If there is only one course of action I can possibly take, and if it is impossible for me not to take it, then in that situation I am not free” (2011, p. 47). Eagleton also makes the point that “Human beings are not at their best in conditions of scarcity, whether natural or artificial” (2011, p. 93)). In one project description submitted to the IFCCC (CDM) registration process, the project proponent described in detail how ‘community’ concerns were taken into account:
In December 2007, 180 bags with food supplies were provided to the land owners that at that time had a lease agreement with Fuerza y Energ.a Bii Hioxo, S.A. de C.V. The bags with food supplies included rice, beans, wheat flour, sugar, coffee, chillies, cookies, tomato sauce, soup, etc. The donation was well received by the land owners; some of them even showed grateful to company representatives. Each bag with food supplies was valued in US$ 16 so the contribution amounted to US$ 2,880 (CDM, 2012a, p. 45).
According to this project document, almost identical ‘food bags’ were distributed in December 2008 and December 2010, along with toys (April 2008), mother’s day gifts (May 2008) and school supplies (August 2008) (CDM, 2012a, pp. 45–46). On such an uneven playing field, it is highly problematic that such gifts27 were so nonchalantly framed as positive responses to community needs. I read this as a
stark example of the deep structural inequalities that characterize relations between wind developers and Istmeños y Istmeñas.
In the context of the expanding frontier of ‘green capital’ in Mexico how were wind resources in the Isthmus imagined and realized as a new frontier of capitalist expansion and what were the political
27 Gifts, which problematically, resemble the gifts of ‘beads and trinkets’ that were typically offered by colonizers to indigenous peoples during early periods of colonization.
ecological effects of framing large-scale private wind farming as ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ developments? The contemporary re-territorialization of the Isthmus as a ‘green energy corridor’ was abstracted from the contextualized and lived experiences of Indigenous Istmeños y Istmeñas. Temporally this distance is marked by almost twenty years between the installation of the first anemometrical devices and the commencement of the first large-scale wind farm. Although the colloquiums that were organized in the early 2000s were rhetorically ‘public’ it is unclear who was representing the diverse communities. Communities in resistance today consistently argue that they were not consulted fairly or transparently, or at all in some cases. Were the community representatives the local intermediaries who had been paid by the prestanombres to broker the first land access contracts? Were they the local political elites whose legitimacy is today contested in communities like Álvaro Obregón? The spatial distance is marked by the separation between Mexico City (México imaginario), where law and policy decisions were made, and the Isthmus itself (México profundo); by the technical and decontextualized ‘discovery’ of the Isthmus’ wind resources by the Colorado based NREL; by the negotiations held in international forums to operationalize the clean development mechanism. At each stage of the re-imagination of the Isthmus as a ‘clean energy corridor’ Indigenous peoples were fundamentally excluded.
This is the argument the maps in Figure 4 and Figure 5 make. They propose that the Isthmus was wasted and empty (and therefore free of history and politics). This trope was politically significant in the negotiations over land access agreements. Companies were only ‘willing to pay’ between 50 - 150 pesos per hectare per year for the ‘degraded’ and ‘unproductive’ coastal plains. As Figure 2 exemplifies in the global ecology of green capital, waste ought to be a source of ‘valuable’ energy. Only irrational agitators would quibble with that.
The environmental history of the Isthmus as a capitalist wind energy landscape highlighted the central role the Mexican state played in re-making the Isthmus as a strategic wind corridor. In preparing for the operationalization of NAFTA, the Mexican state shifted its priorities away from electricity provision for the benefit of the ‘public’ (although this was itself a ‘liberal’ public – a universal civil society that was itself removed from the context and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples across Mexico) to the benefit of the ‘market’, an ever more disengaged relationship. The translations between ‘local’ and ‘liberal’ were distorted through the long histories of oppression, marginalization and exclusion. Efforts to ‘capture’ the
wind for the market exacerbated caciquismo (further entrenching the political and economic power of local elites) and the internal divisions within and between communities. It exacerbated the uncertainties over land tenure regimes. As struggles today highlight understandings of land and territory do not easily fit within rigid systems of codified land tenure.
How are social movements resisting the ‘green’ narrative? Local struggles against state and corporate control of wind farming can be understood as part of ongoing political struggles of indigenous peoples across southern Mexico for defense of land and territory in contexts of historical injustices (Binford, 1985; Campbell, 1993, 2001; López, 2012, 2012; Rubin, 1994, 1997). As a space of ‘virtual’ peace the frontier of ‘green capital’ in Mexico operates to depoliticize the forms of violence that accompany the commodification and enclosure of nature (and the creative destruction of non-capitalist values). It attempts to produce a smooth, abstract, or virtual space where this structural violence is ignored and political conflict no longer exists. Local struggles make this process of abstraction visible. They make visible the distance between the promises of ‘green economy’ and the localized effects of these projects. They describe how they have not benefited in any equitable way from these projects, how their biocultural values and systems have been misrecognized as wasted. The processes of making the Isthmus into a strategic wind energy corridor were decontextualized and disengaged from their everyday experiences, their agencies, needs and livelihoods.
These same histories of oppression, marginalization and exclusion however highlight the ongoing capacities of indigenous peoples for self-government and political autonomy. In the case of Álvaro Obregón the reinvigoration of the process of the Asamblea General is emblematic of the dialogical ethos that appears central, if still nascent in many communities, to the politics of life in the Isthmus. As one interviewee explained:
The companies and the Mexican state itself have planted the myth that many of the communities that are today pursuing self-organization processes or processes of resistance are communities that are not open to dialogue, that they are violent communities, communities that are always wanting to use violence to defend their supposed human rights. This is the argument of the companies. It is the argument of the Mexican state. What we have seen, case by case, is that this is a lie. The communities are always disposed to dialogue because this is part of the philosophy of life. They always propose, almost unequivocally, that if there is a possibility to resolve a problem through dialogue, they do it (Interview, 24 January 2014).
In this context, these struggles can contribute to our understanding of ‘resistance as peacebuilding’ in three ways. First, that contextualized visions of peace are understood as processes that are articulated with the political autonomies of indigenous peoples, and the protection of their agrarian and biocultural systems. Second, that mobilizations against large-scale wind farm highlight the forms of structural violence that is intrinsic to life at ‘green energy’ frontiers. Third, these struggles emphasize the spaces where peacebuilding occurs (both within and outside the state).
What does this mean for NGO interventions in regards to green energy frontiers? The NGO interventions discussed in this thesis did not frame the place-based struggles of Indigenous Istmeños as the cause of conflict. These NGOs, however, still draw upon technocratic interventions that appear less and less relevant in light of the increasingly political forms of resistance being practiced by communities like Álvaro Obregón. The (irresistible) desire to identify ‘best practices’ is one example that is at risk of becoming a technique that inadvertently produces a ‘virtual’ space that is dis-embedded from the historical and geographical specificities of particular locales. New political forms of resistance, exemplified by Álvaro Obregón, operate beyond the state that calls into question the efforts of NGOs to use the state apparatus to support indigenous tactics of resistance. Improving access to information, public participation in environmental decision-making (through improving assessment and approval processes), and government accountability (transparency and access to justice) do not necessarily engage with the structures of violence that accompany the expansion of ‘green capital’. Several of the NGOs I spoke with recognize this challenge.
Many of the NGOs I interviewed described their primary objective was to work with (acompañar) the communities in resistance. They describe the term ‘acompañar’ in different ways. The term acompañar was used to describe various practices including legal representation (e.g. seeking to have land access contracts nullified or filing lawsuits for human rights violations), advocacy (e.g. seeking to change corporate or state behaviors) and research (e.g. sharing information and analysis). Sara Koopman (2011) discuses the nature of ‘accompaniment’ in relation to peace zones in Colombia. In the case of San José de Apartadó and the work of Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), accompaniment refers to the embodied practices of privileged bodies walking alongside bodies in danger in order to make space for peace by preventing actual violence (even if it is spatially and temporally constrained). There are clear differences
between Koopman’s focus on bodies in motion creating alternative securities, and the focus in this thesis on NGO interventions that involve legal representation, advocacy and research. However, NGO bodies are also in motion and they too seek to create spaces for peacebuilding by buffering communities against the economic and geopolitical power of transnational companies, and the unaccountable power of the Mexican state. In some cases, NGO efforts to transform the contemporary conflicts in the Isthmus did not appear to recognize the political dimensions of these conflicts or, the political autonomy of different indigenous communities. As an Indigenous activist explained: “they [NGOs] say they accompany us, but there are some NGOs that don’t accompany, they decide and take the place of the community and the movement (Interview 7, 24 January 2014). However, closing the distance in space and time between the interventions and the forms of resistance being practiced by Istmeños and Istmeñas, has the potential to co-create spaces for indigenous peoples to continue to nurture their autonomous capacities and ‘heal’ the wounds of historical injustices. NGOs can do this through working with communities in resistance who seek to strengthen their internal cohesion and perform their alternative development visions. This is the nature of transformative political practice at this ‘green energy’ frontier.